Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  Following upon this loss of harmony in institutions came a change in the national mood, which may be described, perhaps, as a failure of nerve. The forthright enjoying temper of the Elizabethans had gone; the world was no longer so simple and so spacious; the stage had become full of questioning Hamlets. It is a mood familiar to students of classical antiquity, and may be found in high relief during the first centuries of our era. The weakening of the social fabric, and consequently of the protective power of society, increases the strain on the personality. The hopefulness of youth is succeeded by a sad acquiescence, if not by despondency: the eye looks inward; the soul is disillusioned with the world, and seeks refuge elsewhere. It is the preparatio evangelica, for it turns the mind to God. In such a mood religion comes to birth, for the worldliness of youth rejoicing to run its course is exchanged for the spirituality of those who find here no continuing city. Life seems no longer a thing to be shaped by man’s endeavour, and in every creed, from the predestination of the Calvinist to the mystical Platonism of the scholar, it is conceived as a puppet-play moved by the hand of Omnipotence. Metaphysic has broken into a secure world, and with it have come a sense of sin, a constant dwelling upon death, a haunting consciousness of eternity.

  Something of this temper soon became dominant in the land. Robust spirits might reject it and recover the pagan standpoint; wise men might struggle through it to certainty and peace; but the shadow of it was universal, even in the defiance of the pagan. There was everywhere a quickening and intensifying of certain spiritual emotions, a sense of man’s littleness and dependence upon the unseen, a movement away from humanism towards mysticism, a clouding of horizons which had once been so bright and clear. The congregations which listened to Donne’s analysis of sin and his pictures of the “various and vagabond heart of the sinner” thronged to St. Paul’s because the preacher was in tune with their own thoughts. Death was so much with them that they found comfort in envisaging its terrors. There was satisfaction in the belittling of life: “We have a winding-sheet in our mother’s womb, which groweth with us from our conception, and we come into the world wound up in that winding-sheet, for we come to seek a grave.” The unthinkableness of eternity hag-rode their imagination. “Methusalem with all his hundreds of years was but a mushroom of a night’s growth to this Day, and all the four Monarchies with all their thousands of years, and all the powerful Kings and all the beautiful Queens of this world, were but as a bed of flowers, some gathered at six, some at seven, some at eight, all in one morning, in respect of this Day.”

  A consequence of such a mood was that men believed, as in the days of St. Cyprian, that the youth of the world had gone, and that they were living in its old age. The new science, the new astronomy, assisted the mood by breaking down the old comfortable, concentric universe. “There prevailed in his (Milton’s) time an opinion that the world was in its decay, and that we have had the misfortune to be produced in the decrepitude of Nature. It was suspected that the whole creation languished, that neither trees nor animals had the height or bulk of their predecessors, and that everything was daily sinking by gradual diminution.” We find the belief in Raleigh: “The long day of mankind draweth fast towards an evening, and the world’s tragedy and time are near at an end.” “Think not thy time short in this world,” wrote Sir Thomas Browne, “since the world itself is not long.” It is everywhere in the sermons of the divines. Man is “an aged child, a grey-headed infant,” and but a ghost of his own youth. “As the world is the whole frame of the world, God hath put into it a reproof, a rebuke, lest it should seem eternal, which is a sensible decay and age in the whole frame of the world and every piece thereof. The seasons of the year irregular and distempered; the sun fainter and languishing; men less in stature and shorter lived. No addition, but only every year new sorts, new species of worms and flies and sicknesses, which argue more and more putrefaction of which they are engendered.” “This is the world’s old age; it is declining; albeit it seems a fine and beautiful thing in the eyes of them that know no better, and unto those who are of yesterday and know nothing it looks as if it had been created yesterday, yet the truth is, and a believer knows, it is near the grave.” “The world’s span-length of time is drawn now to less than half an inch, and to the point of the evening of the day of this old grey-haired world.” The result of such a belief was to cheapen the value of human endeavour, to show human greatness as trivial against the vastness of eternity. “Jezebel’s dust is not amber, nor Goliah’s dust terra sigillata, medicinal; nor does the serpent, whose meat they are both, find any better value in Dives dust than in Lazarus.” There was but one paramount duty in life, to save the soul. “These are the two great works which we are to do in this world: first to know that this world is not our home, and then to provide us another home whilst we are in this world.” “Build your nest upon no tree here,” Samuel Rutherford wrote to Lady Kenmure, “for ye see God hath sold the forest to death.” These are more than the commonplaces of theology; they are the expression of a temper which, by the year 1630, had become a background to thought, an atmosphere which insensibly coloured every man’s outlook.

  In an age of uncertainty and change there is inevitably a craving for definition and discipline. Even if this or that law is dubious, Law itself is regarded as more than ever essential; in Hooker’s famous panegyric her seat is in the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world, and she is the mother of all peace and joy. To live at all, man must make rules and keep them, and in the prevalent flux he hankers after rigidity. The more doubtful the political outlook the fiercer will be the dogmas which men create and contend for; the more the foundations of the Church are shaken the more high-flying and arbitrary will be the conflicting creeds. It is an old trait of human nature, when in the mist, to be very sure about its road. In such an era a religious faith tends to become a complete philosophy of life, governing also the minutest details of the secular world. Man cries for guidance and authority, and if he rejects one sanction he will invent others more compelling than the old. Having shaken himself loose from history, he tends to an abstract idealism. The English polity had been built up piecemeal by many compromises, but its seventeenth-century critics were apt to forget this, and to devise, like Milton, a brand-new symmetrical structure, unrelated to the past. But Milton had the supreme merit that he always believed in the free and rational soul of man. “He who wisely would restrain the reasonable soul of man within due bounds, must first himself know perfectly how far the territory and dominion extends of just and honest liberty. As little must he offer to bind that which God hath loosened as to loosen that which He hath bound. The ignorance and mistake of this high point hath heaped up one huge half of all the misery that hath been since Adam.” The human reason was not commonly valued so high by Milton’s contemporaries, and they readily bent themselves before authority — of king or parliament, of bishop, Bible or congregation, or of personal revelation. Differences, which should have been discretionary, were elevated into matters of essential principle, and men were ready to stake body and soul on the finest points of dogma in Church and State.

  Happily these troubles of the spirit, so far as England was concerned, befell in a society nicely integrated and fundamentally stable. Men of quick conscience and fine intelligence, who are the shaping spirits in any era, felt their impact, but there were in the land strong stabilizing forces which were for long untouched by them, and which made it certain that change would come by slow degrees. There was not, as on the continent of Europe, a gulf fixed between the nobility and the commonalty; the nobles were no more than the topmost class of a great body of gentry which in the lower ranges came very near to the yeomanry, and embraced what we know to-day as the middle and professional classes. Even at the summit, the grandees of Plantagenet and Tudor origin found themselves compelled to mix with the new creations of James I. A family of Norman descent would apprentice a younger son to a trade, and marry a daughter to some new City knight or young lawyer from the
Temple. Boys of ancient houses sat side by side on the grammar-school benches with the sons of farmers and tradesmen. The land was organized locally for defence and administration; an unpaid magistracy enforced the king’s mandates and administered the new poor law; the ordinary citizen was the only soldier, the mediæval levy had not yet disappeared, and on the Marches manorial tenants armed with broadswords still met the judges of assize. There was little rigidity among classes, but the intensity of provincial feeling gave immense power to those local leaders who had a long tradition of popularity, so that the Lancashire gentry were accustomed to wear the Stanley livery. Shire, parish, and town were living organisms, managing their affairs with little outside interference, and to buttress their honest particularism there was a mass of hoar-ancient custom and tradition which gave a man of Gloucestershire a different outlook from a man of Devon or Kent. England still stood in the old ways, and in her affection for them lay a vast latent conservative power. But with this conservatism was joined a high measure of independence. The progress of enclosures was bringing the yeoman and the tenant-farmer into greater importance, and if each locality had its special patriotism, so had each class its own stubborn loyalties. So far as we can judge, it was on the whole a comfortable society, full of ancestral jollities, and secure, for in most parts of England a century had elapsed since the tramp of armies had echoed in their fields.

  North of the Tweed the case was different. Scotland had for centuries been emptied from vessel to vessel, and civil war was in the memories of living men. In the Highlands the clan system still held together a primitive society, but its Border variant had broken down, and elsewhere no settled order of life had been developed. The Scottish nobles had not laid aside their ancient turbulence; whereas in England the duel was coming into fashion (a step towards civilization), they still held by bravos and the “killing affray.” All classes were miserably poor; the gentry lived squalidly in their little stone towers, the peasant was half-starved and half-clad, and rural life had few of the English amenities. The land was strewn with the relics of mediævalism, and amid this lumber the spirit of the Knoxian Reformation burned furiously, destroying much that was ill and not a little that was good. In a later chapter we shall consider more closely the condition of Scotland; here it is sufficient to note that the land was far readier for violent change than its southern neighbour. Its conservatism was a thing of private sentiment and passion rather than of fidelity to proved institutions; its history had given it a noble patriotism, but few things to cherish beyond a savage independence, and the cataclysmic breach with the ancient Church had predisposed it to other breaches. At the same time the Union of the Crowns had brought it into close relations with England, its nobility frequented the court, its civil and ecclesiastical policies were affected by Westminster. No overt act, no spiritual mood of England could be without its reactions in the north, and a flame which burned slowly amid the lush meadows and green hedgerows might run like wildfire among the dry heather.

  An era of unrest produces a thousand types, but in the long run they range themselves in two parties, for human nature — especially English human nature — tends always to a dualism. It is not easy to find a definition for either Cavalier or Puritan which shall embrace on the one hand Suckling and Traherne, Laud and Clarendon, Rupert and Falkland: on the other Hampden and Barebone, Bunyan and Milton, Ireton and Lilburne. From the one party we may exclude the mere roysterers — Milton’s “sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine” — and from the other the hypocrites and the crack-brains; every great cause has its unworthy camp-followers. The division was not a social one, for the Puritans had many of the old nobility and some of the best of the country gentry in their ranks; and the Cavaliers had the bulk of the peasantry and a share of the trading and professional classes. The two factors in the situation were the crumbling of old things and the need of substitutes, the questioning and the demand for certainty; the problem was how to define the fundamentals, and where to find authority. Men of the same party answered it in different and often inconsistent ways.

  The stream of the Cavalier temperament was fed by many distant springs. There was the punctilio of honour, the devotion to a master, which made royalists of simple and chivalrous souls: men like Hopton and Capel, Sunderland and Sir Bevil Grenville; men like Sir Edmund Verney, the knight marshal, from whose dying hand the standard dropped at Edgehill, though his creed was not that of the king. There were the lovers of Old England like Clarendon, its old Church, its folk religion, “its old good manners, its old good humour, and its old good nature” — things like to be destroyed by rash hands which could only offer a drab alternative. There were the believers in a central authority, and in the domain of law as against anarchy — liberal thinkers for the most part, and zealous reformers, who stood as firmly as Milton for the freedom of the human spirit, but resisted an iconoclasm which they held to be the path to servitude. Such were Falkland — who has given true conservatism its motto: “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change” — and Sidney Godolphin, who, like his friend, fell early on the battlefield. There were the opportunists as against the dogmatists, the men who held with Donne that truth is not found by the straight road of an easy revelation, but must be sought by a spiral course, and that, as Cosin put it, “faith is not on this side knowledge, but beyond it.” There were the scholars, full of the classical Renaissance; and the Platonists, who were not content to make the Bible the one source of truth or to condemn as carnal what they held to be divine. And there were the poets, who refused to narrow the world which God had made, and, like Herbert and Vaughan and Traherne, found everywhere “bright shoots of everlastingness”; in such men mysticism does not reject humanism, but enfolds and transcends it.

  In this medley of types there was infinite room for difference — Laud’s theory of church government, for example, was antipathetic to most of the party — but under the pressure of their opponents they found common ground, and a temperament was hardened into a creed. That creed was, shortly, the need of preserving a central authority in the kingship. Men who had hotly criticized Charles’s policy, who had no love for Laud and his ways, who had sympathized with Hampden and Eliot, found themselves ranged beside country squires who had few ideas beyond ale and foxes. Just as Oxford’s treasures of Renaissance plate were melted down to provide current coin for the troops, so far-reaching doctrines were given a partial and popular statement, and philosophies were reduced to formulas and watchwords. In the Middle Ages treason was held the rankest of crimes, because so little was needed to wreck the brittle mechanism of the State. So now, with change and anarchy in the air, lovers of order stood by the one well-sanctioned existing authority — the king.

  In the Puritan party we find less variety of type and a simpler temperament, but here also is diversity. The basis was in the first instance religion. The original Puritan was one who desired to purify the Church from all taint of Romanism, and to the end there were Puritans who remained Churchmen. But presently, as the difficulties of the task became apparent, criticism of liturgical forms and of the extravagances of episcopal power hardened with many into an opposition to all hierarchical church government, and the acceptance of the Presbyterian doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers” and the polity of the reformed churches in France, Switzerland, and Scotland. This ecclesiastical preference was extended into secular affairs, and the Puritan added to his creed a passion for civic freedom. There were also the sectaries who had been persecuted since the early days of Elizabeth, and who were distasteful alike to Anglican and Presbyterian — men who were extreme individualists in church matters, and regarded the congregation as the divinely appointed organism.

  Puritanism was neither an ecclesiastical system nor a theological creed. Calvinism, with its doctrine of “exclusive salvation,” was, at first, the belief of Anglican and Presbyterian alike, and it remained the prevailing creed of the Puritan party as of the bulk of their opponents — rejected only
by Laud’s Arminian school, and by sects like the Baptists and the Quakers. The most powerful statement of Puritan theology will be found in Anglican divines like Donne; no Scottish Covenanter ever dwelt more terribly upon original sin, the torments of hell, and the awe of eternity. Nor was the Puritan either a very learned and subtle theologian, or a profound expositor of his own ecclesiastical tastes. When a man of Milton’s genius embarks upon doctrinal questions he is “in wandering mazes lost,” like the evil spirits in Paradise Lost, who sat on a hill and debated predestination. For wisdom, breadth of knowledge, and logical acumen, no Puritan champion can vie with Hooker, Chillingworth, John Hales, and Jeremy Taylor — few even reach the standard of Laud.

  Puritanism was above all things the result of a profound spiritual experience in the Puritan. It is to John Bunyan and George Fox that we must go if we would learn the strength of the faith. The questioning of the epoch resulted for such men in an overwhelming sense of sin and an overpowering consciousness of God; their knowledge, in Cromwell’s famous words, was not “literal and speculative, but inward and transforming the mind to it.” Unless we realize this primary fact we cannot explain why so many diverse creeds were ultimately conjoined to form one conquering temperament. Inevitably the faith and the practice narrowed and hardened. Sunday, the day on which Calvin played bowls and John Knox gave supper parties, became the Jewish Sabbath, and the Mosaic law in many of its most irrelevant details was incorporated with the Christian creed. Toleration was impossible for men who saw life as a narrow path through a land shaken by the fires of hell; only kindred communions were tolerated, save by those few sects who, from hard experience, had learned a gentler rule. A limited number inclined to a complete separation of Church and State, but the majority desired a purified State, which would be the ally and the servant of the Church. They rejected the world of sense, for there could be no innocency in what had been corrupted by Adam’s sin, and their eyes were fixed austerely upon their own souls. The strength of Puritanism lay in its view of the direct relation of God and man; its weakness in the fact that this relation was narrowly and often shallowly construed. The Puritan became, by his severe abstraction, a dangerous element in society and the State, since human institutions are built upon half-truths, opportunisms, and compromises. He was pre-eminently a destructive force, for he was without the historical sense, and sought less to erect and unite than to pull down and separate. Milton’s words might be taken as his creed: “By His divorcing command the world first rose out of chaos; nor can be renewed again out of confusion but by the separating of unmeet consorts.”